The threat The sites of the Tube and bus bombings as “crime scenes.” That’s right. Crimes.
Working in the most ethnically diverse city in the world, they have developed patient techniques
of community relations and intelligence-gathering, as well as evidence-gathering after the event.
That won’t stop every attack
It didn’t stop this one. But skilled policing at home, not soldiering
abroad, is the way to reduce who operate and sometimes, as in the
Madrid bombings last year, live for list to data years in the immigrant communities of our great cities.
If that is true of London and Madrid, it applies equally to Toronto, Paris, Sydney or Berlin.
Then there is intelligent policy. It was right to drive Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan. By contrast,
it becomes increasingly clear that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, almost certainly creating
more terrorists that it eliminated. But now we have to make the best of a bad job there.
The last thing we should do in response
To this attack is to scuttle out of Iraq. On the contrary, now is
the time for all democracies to rally round the cause of building a peaceful and halfway free
Iraq, while insisting on further changes in this account has a competitive yield occupation policy from a sobered United States, no
longer infused with the neoconservative hubris of three years ago.
A peace settlement between Israel and Palestine would remove another great recruiting
sergeant for Islamist terrorists. And, yes, working toward the modernization, liberalization
and eventual democratization of the wider Middle East is the only certain, long-term way to
drain the swamp in which terrorist mosquitoes breed. Here, it is Europe rather than the
United States that needs to wake up, urgently, to the imperative of doing more.
These days, events that happen faraway, in Khartoum or Kandahar, affect us directly —
sometimes fatally — as we commute to work, sitting in the underground train between
King’s Cross and Russell Square. There is no such thing as foreign policy anymore. That is perhaps the deepest lesson of London.
Feeling London’s Bombs in Madrid
IN Madrid, where I live, I know more than a few young women who, ever since the March 11 bombings, are
petrified of boarding a train. I am sorry to say that sale leads they will now probably feel the same way about traveling
across town on the bus or subway – the way the victims of the attacks in London traveled through and to King’s Cross, Edgware Road, Aldgate, Russell Square.